The central portion or transept of St Giles’s Church, opening from the
south, formed a distinct place of worship, under the name of the Old
Church, and this seems to have been the first arranged for Protestant
worship after the Reformation. It was the scene of the prelections of
John Knox (who, it will be remembered, was the first minister of the
city under the reformed religion), until a month before his death, when
it appears that another portion of the building—styled the Tolbooth
Kirk—was fitted up for his use.
[Illustration: John Knox’s Pulpit.]
It also happened to be in the Old Kirk that the celebrated riot of the
23rd of July 1637 took place, when, on the opening of the new Episcopal
service-book, Jenny Geddes, of worthy memory, threw her cutty-stool at
the dean who read it—the first weapon, and a formidable one it was,
employed in the great civil war.[72]
[Illustration: Jenny Geddes’s Stool.]
Jenny Geddes was an herbwoman—_Scottice, a greenwife_—at the Tron
Church, where, in former as well as in recent times, that class of
merchants kept their stalls. It seems that, in the midst of the hubbub,
Jenny, hearing the bishop call upon the dean to read the _collect_ of
the day, cried out, with unintentional wit: ‘Deil colic the wame o’
ye!’[73] and threw at the dean’s head the small stool on which she sat;
‘a ticket of remembrance,’ as a Presbyterian annalist merrily terms it,
so well aimed that the clergyman only escaped it by jouking;[74] that
is, by [ducking or] suddenly bending his person.
Jenny, like the originators of many other insurrections, appears to
have afterwards repented of her exertions on this occasion. We learn
from the simple diarist, Andrew Nichol, that when Charles II. was
known, in June 1650, to have arrived in the north of Scotland, amidst
other rejoicings, ‘the pure [_q.d._ poor] kaill-wyves at the Trone
[Jenny Geddes, no doubt, among the number] war sae overjoyed, that they
sacrificed their standis and creellis, yea, the verie _stoollis_ they
sat on, in ane fyre.’ What will give, however, a still more unequivocal
proof of the repentance of honest Jenny (after whom, by the way, Burns
named a favourite mare), is the conduct expressly attributed to herself
on the occasion of the king’s coronation in 1661 by the _Mercurius
Caledonius_:
‘But among all our bontados and caprices,’ says that curious register
of events,[75] ‘that of the immortal Jenet Geddis, Princesse of the
Trone adventurers, was most pleasant; for she was not only content to
assemble all her Creels, Basquets, _Creepies_,[76] Furmes, and other
ingredients that composed the Shope of her Sallets, Radishes, Turnips,
Carrots, Spinage, Cabbage, with all other sorts of Pot Merchandise
that belongs to the garden, but even her Leather Chair of State, where
she used to dispense Justice to the rest of her Langkale Vassals, were
all very orderly burned; she herself countenancing the action with a
high-flown flourish and vermilion majesty.’
The Scottish Society of Antiquaries nevertheless exhibit in their
museum a clasp-stool, for which there is good evidence that it was the
actual stool thrown by Mrs Geddes at the dean.
In the southern aisle of this church, the Regent Murray, three weeks
after his assassination at Linlithgow, February 14, 1569-70, was
interred: ‘his head placed south, contrair the ordour usit; the
sepulchre laid with hewin wark maist curiously, and on the head ane
plate of brass.’ John Knox preached a funeral-sermon over the remains
of his friend, and drew tears from the eyes of all present. In the
Tolbooth Church, immediately adjoining to the west, sat the convention
which chose the Earl of Lennox as his successor in the regency.
Murray’s monument was not inelegant for the time; and its inscription,
written by Buchanan, is remarkable for emphatic brevity.
[Illustration: Modern Monument to the Marquis of Montrose (see p. 108).]
This part of the church appears to have formerly been an open lounge.
French Paris, Queen Mary’s servant, in his confession respecting the
murder of Darnley, mentions that, during the communings which took
place before that deed was determined on, he one day ‘took his mantle
and sword, and went to walk (_promener_) in the High Church.’ Probably,
in consequence of the veneration entertained for the memory of ‘the
Good Regent,’ or else, perhaps, from some simple motive of conveniency,
the Earl of Murray’s tomb was a place frequently assigned in bills for
the payment of the money. It also appears to have been the subject of
a similar jest to that respecting the tomb of Duke Humphrey. Robert
Sempill, in his _Banishment of Poverty_, a poem referring to the year
1680 or 1681, thus expresses himself:
‘Then I knew no way how to fen’;
My guts rumbled like a _hurle-barrow_;
I dined with saints and noblemen,
Even sweet Saint Giles and Earl of Murray.’
In the immediate neighbourhood of the Earl of Murray’s tomb, to the
east, is the sepulchre of the Marquis of Montrose, executed in 1650,
and here interred most sumptuously, June 1661, after the various
parts of his body had been dispersed for eleven years in different
directions, according to his sentence.[77]